Rainy Days Have Found Us

Hi there, my name is Martin, and I’m traveling with the BIObus collecting insects across the east cost of Canada. This week we are at Fundy National Park in New Brunswick. On Friday we woke up early in the morning worrying about the pouring rain we heard overnight. Hearing rain pretty much meant one thing: damage control. We had a quick breakfast and then we decided to set up our third collecting site. We packed up the RV and headed out down the road. We got to the hiking path that was going to lead us to our site; we had no idea what sort of a hike we had in front of us. After a grueling hill climb of about a kilometer up the Costal Trail, we made it to our site. At this point we were pretty good at setting up sites and breezed through the setup, just in time too, it began to rain… hard. Next on the list of things to do was damage control for the two sites we set up the day before.

We got to our first site at Maple Grove for damage control but at this point the rain was pouring buckets on us, we had no choice but to continue on. When checking on a site you are really collecting the insects the traps have caught and making sure there is no damage to any of the traps and that they’re all still functioning. The flight intercept traps needed to be emptied into a net, the malaise trap bottles needed replacing, the pit falls needed to be topped- off with ethanol, and the pan traps needed to be emptied and refilled. Luckily the damage caused by the rain wasn’t as bad as we thought it would be. The only damage was the damage our pants and socks took from the rain. We came out of the forest wet and miserable. We made our way back to the campsite with the heaters blasting and we made ourselves fajitas and drinks for dinner. With our moral back up we are ready for another day.

First week trapping!

First week trapping!

First of all, hello! I’m Graham Ansell, and this is my first time on the BIObus. I’m really excited to get all of our collecting and research underway, it’s going to be a great time. The team is still getting to know each other, but I’m sure we’ll get along just fine.

The crew setting up the Standardized Sampling site at Caribou Plain Trail in the fog.

The first site that we set up in is called Maple Grove, and it is surrounded by beautiful trees with the tips of big quartz rocks sticking up from the moss. Most of the work we are doing here is for Standardized Sampling Project, for which we use several common arthropod traps with replication in different sites. The specimens we collect will be genetically barcoded, enabling us to identify species by matching them to reference barcodes (www.boldsystems.org). We set up malaise traps, pan traps, pitfall traps, an intercept trap, a Berlese funnel, and took a core sample. We are all still getting used to how to get everything put together! The yellow pan traps, which are just plastic yellow camping dishes, sometimes need to be held in place with little sticks that we find around the forest floor; a quite low-tech and simple trap. Our second site, where we set up the same kinds of traps, is off of Fundy’s Caribou Plain trail, although it should really be called Caribou Marsh! We almost lost a couple of boots along the way, but we finally got the whole site set up, moans and groans aside. All in all, it was a good first day for everybody, although we were hoping that the foggy weather would improve a little.

Insect aspirator

However, the weather did not improve! The rain did stop while we were climbing the mountainous Coastal Trail, where we set up our second sampling site. The nearby Point Wolfe River is so large, it’s awesome; the city life doesn’t stand up to this place. When we ran some active collecting (flipping over logs and running around with nets) I found an enormous bald faced hornet under a bunch of rotting wood. What was he even doing there! A dramatic “forceps vs. wasp” battle ensued once I realized he couldn’t fit through my aspirator tube. An aspirator is a series of tubes and a vial used to suck up bugs.

The first few days have gone splendidly, here’s hoping for less fog and rain, with a much-needed dose of sunshine!